


1000 miles in search of home

by Nakimochiku



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-05
Updated: 2015-02-05
Packaged: 2018-03-10 16:38:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3297242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nakimochiku/pseuds/Nakimochiku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe home isn't a place, maybe home isn't where he lays his head at night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1000 miles in search of home

Daryl burned himself down that night with Beth laughing stumbling drunk beside him. He doused himself in moonshine, took a breath that was almost like laughing, and set himself on fire. He set alight all his bitterness, all his fears. Memories, nightmares, the expectations of people he couldn't live up to all went onto the fire. Anger, doubt, hate got burnt as well.

Daryl burned himself down like his mama did and came through it like fresh sprouting seeds after a bush fire, and rose from the ashes new and pink skinned. He gave the whole world, his old self the finger and blew the ashes and bone dust from his palms.

He burned himself down, then set himself free.

*

Rick was an idealist a year and a half ago. Rick wanted some place safe, some place wholesome to set down roots. He wanted to bury his fingers in the good clean earth to wipe the blood from them.

Rick believed a year and a half ago. In what, Daryl couldn't say. But he believed in it so fiercely he didn't know how to want anything else.

Now, Rick doesn't believe in anything except bullets and bloodshed. He doesn't think anything is certain, and he prays to nothing and no one save the pitiless god of death, who will take them one at a time no matter what they do.

Daryl stopped fearing death when he saw the broken black remnants of his house. But that doesn't mean he ever stopped resisting it.

"Daryl, your boot's untied." Glenn says, mopping his brow of sweat. Daryl grunts and adjusts his cross bow over his shoulder, walking on just the same despite his swinging laces and the flapping tongue of his boot. Glenn snorts a sudden laugh. "Daryl Dixon, if a walker gets you because you tripped on your shoelaces like a little kid, I'm not going to stop laughing until I'm dead too."

Daryl smiles at that, bends to tighten his laces, but Glenn is still laughing.

"Isn't funny." Rick says, jiggling his baby in his arms, mouth twisted downwards.

"Sure it is." Daryl says, slapping Rick on the shoulder as he gets up to walk again. "S'hilarious."

*

They stop in an Ikea for the night. There are cookies and half fermented bottles of strange juices with Swedish labels, but it's a feast for them. The group scatters across the display room, dumping their stuff on picture perfect beds, made up with comforters that smell of dust and department store.

"Wish we'd thought of this at the beginning." Glenn mourns, flopping down onto a queen sized bed with a moan of muted pleasure, pulling Maggie down with him. "I loved Ikea food."

"I don’t trust any place that sells furniture _and_ food." Daryl says, but he's glad of it, sinking into the soft, new comforter on a bed of his own with a packet of crackers. 

"A real bed, when's the last time we saw one of those?" Maggie sighs, smiling around at her family. To her, to them all, it is short a significant member to sing them all to sleep, to claim the pink bed with too many pillows.

Daryl tucks his arms behind his head, lets the mattress conform to his body. Across from him, in one of the display cases made up to look like a real bedroom, Rick sets his machete down on the night stand, and sets Judith on the bed, smiling down at her.

Daryl sees Rick's shoulders slump as he takes off his gun belt, sees the tired curl of his back as he crawls beside her, soft and vulnerable as a crab from its shell.

Despite or because of everything, Rick is beautiful.

*

"Did you ever want this?" Rick asks, battered cow boy boots kicked up onto the model coffee table. He's long and loose, arms slung over the back of the sofa so that his fingers brush Daryl's shoulder.

He doesn't try to move, even when Rick's thumb strokes circles over his skin. "What?"

Rick shrugs and gestures broadly at the made up room; the soft fabrics and the little throw over the back of the arm chair, the bowl of fake fruit, the books in the shelves.

It is so perfect it is like tv, like smiling families in catalogues.

"Wanted it." Daryl agrees, picking at his nails. He shifts so he's leaning against the arm, away from Rick's fingers so that he can look at him. He presses his foot to Rick's thigh.

"I had it." He gestures broadly again in a way that implies this, but not quite this; a home arranged just so to give the impression of perfection. Daryl hums, tears at a cuticle until it bleeds and then keeps tearing. "Hated every moment of it." Daryl hums again. Rick shifts, so that he's facing Daryl too, their legs tangled on the sofa together. "Do you still want this?"

Daryl looks around again, shakes his head. Rick looks at him for an explanation, but Daryl doesn't know how to wax poetic, how to say it pretty. "Don't need frills and fake fruit to make a home." He shrugs.

*

Home is where Carol cuts his hair with a knife saying, "you'll get split ends this way," and "reminds me of Samson and Delilah," in turns, lips pursed as she works, twisting his head this way and that to get the hash job some form of even.

Home is where Michonne grins at him and says, "There are my favourite pretty blue eyes. I was starting to forget what they looked like behind all that hair," and "it got any longer I was gonna find you a cute little hair clip or something."

Home is where Maggie and Glenn have little spats so Glenn can sprawl on his bed and say, "Can I crash with you for a bit?" Even though there are at least ten other beds, and Daryl's bed is right beside Maggie's. Daryl will nod because he knows he'll feel Glenn climb out of bed in the middle of the night to slither back in beside her.

Home is where Tara gives him fist bumps and Carl helps him gather materials for bolts. It’s where Abraham chops fire wood and Rosita makes dinner. Where Tyreese rocks little Judith in his massive arms, and Sasha mends rips in Bob's jacket.

Home is where Daryl can watch Rick sitting in a high back chair, sliding a whetstone over the subtle curve of his machete blade, like a lover smoothes fingers over skin, until Rick catches him watching and lifts a single brow, neither inviting him over nor pushing him away. But Daryl will come over, working on his bolts so close to Rick he can hear him breathe. So close he wants to kiss him.

Daryl knows he's home, regardless of where he lays his head at night.

*

"We've been lazy long enough." Rick says, standing and sheathing his machete, combing his fingers back through his curls. They have only been in the Ikea for a day. "I want two teams of three. Tara, you're with me and Daryl. Maggie, Carl and Sasha, you're the other team. Start from the lower levels, see if there are breaches in the perimeters, we pick up what we can and we meet back here."

“Why’d you pick me to go with you guys?” Tara mourns as they make their way around the lower levels, swinging her rebar loosely back and forth. "I feel like I'm trying to impress my girlfriend's dad." She whines, an easy skip to her step. She is lighthearted and optimistic and selfless.

Daryl doesn't tell her she's impressed him enough already.

She picks up and puts things down arbitrarily, grabs a stack of tea towels, a set of butcher knives, collections of fancy soaps and scented candles, stuffing it all in her back pack.

"Can I have a cactus?" She chirps when they get to the collection of fake plants arranged in neat lines, one more trapping for a normal looking home.

"The hell y'need a cactus for?" Daryl asks, distractedly plucking withered leaves from dead plants.

Tara shrugs, inspecting one that doesn't look completely dead. "Dunno, I think they're cute. I'd name it Fefe."

Neither of them question, but when Daryl looks at Rick, he's rolling his eyes fondly, and he knows that in her strange father analogy, she's impressed him too.

*

"You've been..." Rick curls his fingers over the handle of his colt as he searches for the word. "Good. Better than I've ever seen you."

Daryl shrugs. There's a question in that, and Rick waits patiently for his answer. Daryl works it out in his head, articulates every word. Beth helped him get better, but Rick doesn't need to hear that.

"You were searching for a place, for a long time. Some place to call home." Rick doesn't nod or hum, he just listens, gaze so intent Daryl has to look away. "You thought home was some place real, physical, y'hated when you couldn't find it but..." He swallows, because now that he's speaking his words sound lame and meaningless. "Home is where the heart is." Rick huffs a little laugh and Daryl shrugs again. "I don't need thanksgiving dinners or a house with a white picket fence, if I got you, and everyone else. If I got that, I'm home."

He looks up at Rick, wants him to understand. He wants Rick to find home just by looking at him, just from feeling the warm brush of his fingers, the way Daryl finds home in Rick.

*

Daryl nearly gave up when Beth was taken. He was tired, old, and broken.  He sat on the road and wanted to wail like a child, wanted his home back, wanted Beth back, didn't know to stop hating himself because Beth wasn't there to tell him that it wasn't his fault. This time it really was; he lost her.  He just let her slip right through his grasping fingers.

Being with Beth had been cathartic. Without her he felt like a puppet with cut strings.

Without his family, or the scattered remnants of them, to feed, to watch over, to protect, he didn't know how to carry on. He didn't know why he should bother. It was a habit, he guessed, remembering Andrea's words. He didn't know how to make himself stop, except to sit in the middle of the train tracks and bite his lip to keep from screaming and screaming, staring blankly in the direction Beth had gone and willing her back.

He hadn't know lacking purpose could be so painful.

All Daryl needed was one thing, just one thing to keep his muscles moving, his eyes open, his pulse steady. All he needed was one thing after the prison's fall, and she had been taken. He wished he was a cheetah, to run to her, an eagle to fly to her. But he was just a man.

He was just a man who only just learned how to let himself have anything, and mere men can only handle so much being taken from them.

Daryl nearly gave up. And he still doesn't know what gave him the strength to get up and keep walking, except the aching in his chest like homesickness and the thick taste on his tongue like nostalgia. He doesn't know what gave him the strength to walk until he could collapse at Rick's feet in relief.

*

"Don't wanna leave here, it's so comfortable." Glenn whines, rolling around his bed like a petulant child. Daryl glances at him, curled in his model bed. "When we go, I'm taking this pillow." Glenn smiles cheekily at him. "Think I love this pillow more than my wife."

"Heard that." Maggie says lightly a few beds over, and Glenn winks at him.

"We could stay a bit." Daryl offers lamely, twisting his fingers in the cotton sheets.

Glenn gives him a look, dark and haunted and sharp. "No we can't." And there's something in that look, those words, that is terror and fury. Then the look is gone and Glenn curls tighter around his pillow, burying his face in it. "Rick wouldn't let us."

Daryl knows that the same terror and fury he saw in Glenn is in Rick too. Distrust is a thorn in his heart. "Could talk to him." He murmurs. "Could ask him to let us stay a bit longer."

Glenn looks up at him and smiles gently, and that is thanks enough without hearing the words. His family is tired, and maybe home isn't a physical place any more, maybe home is just a quiet cacophony of voices and the burbling of a baby and splitting stale gingerbread cookies fourteen ways, but he can allow them some rest.

He can do that much for them.

*

In two and a half years, Daryl has lost his only blood relation, twice. He's fallen on his own arrow. He's been reminded that people are more frightening than the dead could ever be four times. He's gone on several hundred runs. He's touched Rick and _wanted_  more times than he can count.

He can quantify the apocalypse, measure it out in shattered crossbow bolts and squirrels tails. But he can't quantify his own emotions, can't count the subtle changes when they are always fluctuating.

All he knows is that he'd walk a thousand miles and more, spill his own blood on over grown pavement in sacrifice, face an army of the dead and living alike, if he could just get home. He'd do anything at all to stay by Rick's side, always on his left since one gunshot too many has left him hard of hearing in his right.

All Daryl knows is that he's sick of pretending to be made of steel, some unfeeling hard ass, when he loves his family, rag tag and emotionally traumatised as they are.

He needs only one goddamn thing, and it's the warm feeling he gets in his chest like a fluttering bird when he sees Rick's mouth stretch into a smile, hears Carl and Michonne laugh, smells Carol's cooking, touches Rick's arm. So long as he has this feeling in his chest, he can keep going. A thousand miles or a hundred thousand miles, he can keep going.

* 

"We could stay fer a bit." Daryl broaches, pushing aside the curtains of the department store windows. A couple walkers wander around outside, and it feels good to have a wall between them and him, feels good to have an illusion of safety. 

"What?"  Rick comes to stand beside him, peering out as well, breath warm on the curve of his shoulder. 

"Here. We could stay here for a little bit longer." Rick turns so he’s leaning back against the glass, the sun creating a halo, turning his dark curls copper and russet. Daryl looks pointedly away, before chancing another glance, gaze falling to Rick's lips, the slow drag of his tongue when he catches him looking. "It's safe enough, here--"

"It's not safe enough anywhere." Rick returns drily. Daryl shrugs.

"Then we'll take as much as we can get." He looks back outside, stroking the fabric of the curtains between his perpetually dirty fingers. "They're tired." Daryl says when it doesn't look like Rick will concede.

"And you?" Rick asks, resting his hand at the curve of Daryl's ribs, as though counting out his breaths, reassuring himself of something. "Are you tired?"

"Can't afford to be." Daryl gives a shrug, and Rick nods because he understands. "Three days more, a week more, ain't gonna kill us."

"And if it does?"

"Then you can say told you so. In hell."

Rick gives him a slow, reluctant smile, twitching at the corners of his mouth and threatening to become a grin. "Isn't funny."

"Yeah it is." Daryl smiles. "S'hilarious."

*

Rick takes him down on a fainting couch, kisses him hungrily, licking into his mouth, body pressing him hard into the firm cushions so that his world is Rick's hands sliding from his arms to his waist, sneaking beneath his clothes to feel every bump, ridge and scar. Daryl shivers, over whelmed, hands hovering over his face, over his hips, unsure if he should touch.

"You're allowed." Rick whispers, his hands so hot as they smooth over Daryl's trembling belly. He lets his fingers tangle in Rick's thick curls and tugs, lifts his hips to press them together. He's been given permission, and he's wanted. He moans softly, wants Rick to know how bad he's wanted. "Christ Daryl," Rick sighs, pressing their foreheads together, fingers gripping his side hard. "Christ, can I kiss you?"

Daryl huffs a laugh. "Little late for that don't you think?" He presses their lips together, shivers at the sweep of Rick's tongue and meets it with his own, echoing Rick's low moan.

"Want to--" Rick starts, but Daryl shushes him with another kiss, because he knows what Rick wants; to do this slow, take each other apart with tongues and teeth and fingers, to melt into each other; he wants it all too, but they have neither the time or the luxury.

"Let's stay like this." Daryl murmurs, daringly sliding his hands down Rick’s shoulder blades and back to grip his ass, to feel all of him. "Got you right where I want you." Rick chuckles, kisses his face.

I'm home, Daryl's heart sings, thumping hard in his chest. By your side I'm always home.

**Author's Note:**

> in case of apocalypse, hide out in an ikea. food and beds? genius.


End file.
